Raw editing with Affinity Photo

James Paterson demonstrates how to enhance landscapes with this Photoshop alternative

Sometimes a scene might seem disappointing, only to reveal hidden delights when you edit it. A while ago I headed to this beach in South Wales with high hopes, only to be met with flat light, grey skies and relentless drizzle. I didn’t hold out much hope for the raws after viewing them on the back of the camera. But after opening them into Affinity Photo, I realised I may be wrong.

This is often the case with raw files – they hold more detail than you think. The trick is knowing how to tease out the details. Affinity Photo offers all the tools you need to perform these edits. You can enhance tones, convert to mono and apply sharpening. There are also powerful Overlay Paint and Gradient tools to carry out selective adjustments.

The raw editor in Affinity Photo is called the Develop Persona. When you open a raw file, it switches to this automatically; but if you want to edit a JPEG, or any pixel layer in your document, you’re also able to open the Develop Persona and use the raw tools within.

DIGITAL CAMERA 53

Sharpening tools are essential in photo-editing, but it’s easy to get confused over which tools to use, when to sharpen, and how much sharpening to apply. To get this right, it can be helpful to think of sharpening as part of a wider workflow, as I’ll show here.

We’ll perform initial sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom and take the image into Photoshop for a little retouching to remove the distracting leaf, then roundtrip back to Lightroom for final sharpening. Our workflow involves two distinct sharpening stages: one at the beginning, the other at the end.

The first stage is called capture sharpening. This involves general sharpening to correct for inherent softness in an image, or to crisp up details. It’s best done in Lightroom’s Detail Panel (or in the same panel in Camera Raw). Capture sharpening can sometimes amplify image noise, especially in high-ISO images. This is also a good time to apply noise reduction, if the image needs it. We’ll do it here with the help of the Adjustment Brush, which lets us paint in noise reduction to specific areas.

The final stage is referred to as output sharpening: this time the aim is to optimise detail with a specific output and resolution in mind – for example, print or screen.

DIGITAL CAMERA 55

56

DIGITAL CAMERA

James Paterson With over a decade as a writer and photographer behind him, James knows exactly which Photoshop and Lightroom tools and techniques matter most.